Homecoming of the gods

by Frank Achebe

  The other lady who wore trousers was the mayors’ daughter. The denim trousers would squeeze out the curves and would leave the men whistling at the sight of her. Occasionally as well, she would wear strapless tops that would expose her shoulders. Rev. Iňaō was more sympathetic of the younger of the two ladies though his more heaven-ready members were not. They would spit out at the sight of her and tell their children to close their eyes so as to not behold evil. He held a soft spot for her. ‘She is misguided as is her father. Let us pray that God would open their eyes to see where this road of worldliness will eventually lead them before it is too late.’ He would then change his mind in an instant and begin: ‘Judgement, I see judgement! Let it come! Now! Fire! Fire!’ On hearing him scream Fire! with the ferocity of a rockstar from out of his small battery-powered microphone, a newcomer to town would probably take him seriously and call the fire station or take him as a madman.

  Madam Békhtèn was a vain one too. At forty-nine, she still styled herself a ‘lady’ and you dared not call her ‘madam’ in her presence—or greet her with a ‘ma’. It made her appear ‘old’. And she stove not to appear old though an abundance of fat had gathered at her waist, under her arms and on her belly. Most of her curves had disappeared and the rest had dissolved into lines. She had workout tools and used stay-young-forever drugs and supplements. She had her own television fantasies—Marilyn Monroe looks. Her skin tone was not uniform in places showing signs of an attempted bleaching. She was one of those who really liked it hot! She had an abundance of blonde wigs and spent a whole lot on make-ups, nails, lipsticks, jewelleries, body creams, and perfumes. All those gave her the feeling of being in vogue. And she really was in vogue.

  Her greatest vanity was young boys. She always had one living with her. The men of her hall were left to speculate what positions they took her and how they managed to fulfil all her youthful fantasies, which they knew, were exotic and exorbitant. It was always a topic of great interest for them.

  In the time Zach came to Nānti, she was about two weeks away. And that Saturday, she was back with another young boy that would fulfil her vanities or get kicked out for failing.

  One thing was known all over Nānti about this busty woman: she was a tigress. She could roughen anybody up at any time of the day—either verbally or otherwise. She was not a talker but when she spoke, everyone listened and you dared not speak while she spoke. However, she was very generous. Whenever she was happy, everyone around her would be happy. She would throw parties and give out gifts.

  She was also a very sensitive woman. She could not stand snides when she sensed it in a comment. She was altogether a woman of profound feeling for others.

  Madam Békhtèn loved surrounding herself with men; it fuelled her female ego and her dominating instincts. Her own ego, very much like the female ego was far more self-consuming.

  She was never married but she had three daughters from three different men: Peace, Borûn and Ūö. Peace the eldest was born when Joyce ‘Békhtèn’ Bulām was eighteen. Now at thirty-one, she was unmarried and with three kids from three different fathers. She made her own living off a salon on another street in town. She was by all standards, the very epitome of her mother: she was enterprising, strong, dominating, and was keeping her own young boys. Borûn was seven years younger than Peace and less sensible as well. At twenty-four, there was hardly a flirt in and around Nānti that hadn’t had her in his bed. She was sucking and swallowing—and committing abortions—all over Nānti and in the surrounding towns, breaking up marriages. The HIV scare had her mother paying her a bit more attention. She was a brainless twit in a body that was made for the eyes. She was just like her father—randy, sex-crazed and brainless.

  She was Madam Békhtèn’s true dream—a sex symbol. She could have made it as an actress or a singer but she lacked the patience and brain for that. If she continued like that, there was no doubt that she was going to catch the new disease. That was certain. Even if not for the Virus, she was wasting her body away.

  The prize child was Ūö, an eighteen-year old fragile-looking girl. Madam Békhtèn loved her to death and sought in so many ways to protect her from her own life. She hadn’t planned to have her but when she came, she found some joy. However, she had some heavy melancholy about her. She was always indoors and was rarely seen around town. Her only dream was to study in a university, if only she could.

  # # #

  That morning, the car pulled into the compound where Madam Békhtèn had managed a two-storey building. It was not at all grand, it was not one that had been built to taste but to earning which was not ‘huge’ in measure with her tastes.

  The young man with her by name Daniel was a vain one too. His vanity was in his mind. He was an intelligent youth with very modern ideas. And as is normal with young people, Thaddy, for another instance, he had a naïve, Ingersollian and overwhelming belief in his intelligence. It was not strange why he had followed Madam Békhtèn. He was a school leaver who was still waiting on a job. But that aside, he styled himself a Goethe and kept reassuring himself that there was nothing he could not handle. But Nānti had a way of changing things for everybody.

  # # #

  Zach knew to wake while it was still dark for his cleaning up at the river. He was too weak for an early waking, and sleeping on cement blocks was really a big deal. He would not have woken if not for the nightmare. The very same one as he had had in the train. He woke up on the edge of reality screaming ‘Shut up!’ at someone whose face was familiar. That face and the screams however were in the other side of reality.

  The sharp contrast between what had been his normal wake-ups for years and what he had in the shack, left him with a debilitating effect. It had taken him a while to acclimatise to the new and unknown morning.

  His body felt like a heap of crushed stones—or rather, as if it had been crushed by a heap of stones. His head was aching again and he could hardly move a limb off the bed of cement blocks. He felt feverish. The fire from the fire pot had died in the night leaving the roofing-sheet-wall room to return to the temperature of a rainy August night.

  Outside, the cocks were crowing as the greenish first light lit the eastern skies. Zach managed to sit up on the cement block. The boy was still asleep. He had very little will to resist his own frustration but as soon as he saw the boy sleeping like a child curled up in those pieces of clothes, his frustration sank back in.

  They boy had never had any much participation in his life. He’d spent it all alone. The cold nights, the heavy beds, the raggedy bed spreads, to that extent and being the one lightened up Zach for a minute. He had no reason to be frustrated, not when he was at it because of the boy. As he sat up, his eyes landed on the table again. It was still dark but he could see a number of books. Among them were old and rough exercise books that had large lines of ‘The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog’ scribbled on them in an uneven manner. There was a very old English reader for primary schools among the pile of books. The boy had tried learning to read and write. Another exercise book showed that he had tried copying out the words as he saw them in the reader. There were drawings as well of the objects he had seen in the readers. There was also a book of bible stories, which was badly worn with too many pages missing and a lot many others in half. The exercise books showed also that the boy had tried copying out the words and the drawings onto his exercise books.

  Into this revelation disappeared Zach’s anxieties for an instant. It had to mean something after all.

  He lifted the framed photo of Mother and Child and was full of wonder at it. What did such an image mean for a boy who had no place in his world? And for many others like him? To answer those questions, I should bring to my reader’s notice the influence that the children of Nānti had had on the boy.

  # # #

  The vegetable boy was retarded and that ensured that he remained a child even going into young adulthood. That also meant that the children of the town had a lasting influence on him. />
  Pûjó lived in a silent world and so he made do with images. He had a photographic memory and for that, images lasted very long in his head. He would ponder over them and would make his silent judgment over them. One of the images was that of the kids of Nānti kneeling in front of a stool that had a raised photo of the Holy Mother and Child, a couple of candles, making recitations. Since he was deaf and dumb, he would watch as their mouth moved. Their two hands folded just under their chins.

  In Nānti as in many other places, at 6 o’clock, a little kid would be seen on the street with a tiny bell. He/she would ring out the bell for other kids to ‘It’s six o’clock. Come out for block rosary’. The call to prayer actually had a tune to it. As he made the call to prayer, other kids would join him in his singing, with their own tiny brass bells, rosaries and chaplets. They would walk the streets and end their round at a designated place where a small table would have been set with the icons of Mother and Child, a framed photo of them, coloured candles and a prayer book. They would kneel before the table and pray the rosary in unison into the evening. At the end of their prayers, they would be given biscuits, groundnuts and snacks by their host.

  This image greatly fascinated the boy who had lived most of his childhood by begging for food at doors and his young adult by working jobs around town. From a safe distance, he would watch the children and then the photo, the children and then the photo.

  As he grew, the photo began to mean something to him. His best day was when he had managed to pick out one of such photos that had been disposed in the dumpsite because its glass had broken. It was not because he had never been in a mother’s arms at all in his life. It was far profound for him. The image meant something to him, something he could not articulate. When he finally managed to turn the batcher house into his home, the first thing he did was find a table and place the framed photo in the same order as he had seen the children do. He had managed a prayer bead as well. Occasionally, he would pick a pair of coloured candles and would stare at their lights falling off the photo deep into the night.

  # # #

  On seeing that photo, Zach knew it meant something to that boy. What could that be?

  He wondered what the hunter had meant when he said that the boy ‘would see the Face of God.’ Was there something in that image that resembled the Face of God for the boy?

  Let us Hail Mary and let us bless the fruit of her womb. Every Christmas, we are confronted by this image, one that has become divine for many people of the world. The image reassures those who are the least in the world, that they are not forgotten in this world. By this image, we are judged and condemned in our subversiveness. By this image, the ‘vegetables’ of our world are reminded that they are not alone. A lot of us are offended by this image and a lot many others stand before this one image without guilt, the guilt that makes us unworthy of those whom are the ‘vegetables’ of our world.

  As he followed the hunter’s direction to the valley, Zach understood that it was by that image that the boy had lived.

  Chapter Thirteen: A River Of Many Legends

  The walk towards the stream was rather straightforward and Zach found his way as described by the hunter. Nothing eventful happened except that he was wetted by the dewed grasses that lined the footpaths.

  It was almost dawn when he arrived the river.

  The valley was a wide one. It gave the town the appearance of being on a hill. The legendary river flowed into it and out. On both sides of the flattened valley, the townspeople farmed. There were garden eggs, lettuces, groundnuts, potatoes and other local vegetables that were budding under the rains. They gave the valleys a synthetic look, a very beautiful one.

  The stream was about fifteen-twenty-five metres wide on its widest, and a little less than ten on its narrowest.

  Zach was late by the time he arrived as there were about two men, a woman and three children already at work among the vegetables. More time was wasted as he took in the beauty of a full countryside dawn. The light was golden, pure and sweet to the eyes. He wasn’t used to those sights. It made him lift his face to the dawn and soak it in for a moment. He stood and watched the farmers at their day job. By his own reckoning, they were quite early—. But in their own reality, they were not. The average Nāntian was a subsistence farmer as he/she was any other thing. Before they went for their other businesses that took the majority of the day, they would go to the farms first. That meant that they got there before the dawn and left before the sun began to be scorching.

  Zach was already fully intimated of the attitude of the people towards strangers and so he kept to himself. He did not bother shouting out greetings or waving. He found his way down the valley and into the river.

  The river was a foot deep where it joined the valley and like all open water bodies, it was very cold to the morning as it was very warm the night before. Zach stood there and looked around him; the other farmers did not seem to notice him or even pay attention. Zach could not remember ever haven taken his bath in the open and so the idea made him giddy. There were concerns about a soap and a towel but all of those to a man in his situation were luxury, not necessity. Slowly, he began to undress with the carefulness and consciousness of a million people watching.

  He retained a good measure of self-consciousness but as he finally entered the water and started rubbing his body with his bare hands, his attention was diverted to something else other than himself: there were fishes in the river, of all sorts and sizes.

  He had not noticed any fishing in the town, not when he was on the great river and not now that he was in the town itself. The little fishes held his attention like a child. As he watched the fishes scuttle away to reassemble at the foot of the rocks in the river, it clicked in his mind that there would be many more where the water was deeper.

  The bath did not take too long because it was cold, but it was an experience that Zach kept in his ‘positive memory’. It was a rare one and even though it happened many more times after that one morning, he carried the memories of the first time bathing in a river with the dawn overhanging him with him and tiny catfishes scuttling from under his feet.

  If there was anyone who felt a deep connection with others, it was Zach. It was the only motivation that he needed to participate in the lives of others, as if they were his, with the same self-interest. When he ascended in what was known to be a ritual of initiation in Nānti—bathing in the river or any of its streams—, he felt in that moment, just like he had the night before and the previous one (with the boy and the hunter), a connection with the town that made him want to participate in her fate.

  # # #

  The River Nānti had its own mysteries, all of which made it special because the people took those distant legends with a measure of seriousness. The 21st Century, one that held an abundance of promises for mankind in general, which was just three New Year suns away, did nothing to temper those collective feelings. They were what made the people feel special about themselves and they held on to them. Even Rev. Iňaō had respect for that one eccentric exception. And besides, he had other evil things and evil people he was bent on purging.

  Zach was between surprise and curious when the hunter announced on his return from the stream: ‘You are now a true native of this town. Not that it would change much though, with the people. At least not yet.’ The hunter then went ahead and told it all.

  The River Nānti was associated with a goddess of the same name who according to the lore of the town had given birth to the eight towns through which the river flowed. Nānti, of course was the first of the nine children of the goddess whose sacred symbol was the river. No fishing was allowed in the river for it was believed that the ‘river would go home with the fisherman’. What that meant was not at all explicit. It was not known to have been transgressed even in recent times. In the more olden days, the punishment for fishing in the river was public sacrifice to the goddess. It was said, and there was no confirming of its accuracy, that the missionary attempt
s to debunk the myth by proving to the people that nothing would happen when they fished from it, all failed at first attempt. And for that, the legends survived and outlived many others that had passed with the coming of the missionaries.

  ‘Of course, she could water our gardens but we never ever fish from the river. People have run mad doing so and mind you, this is not some fairy tales. This is serious. There was a time that the government tried building a bridge across the river in the last town. They lost all their men. The bridge was never completed.’

  That was supposed to make Zach scared. He could hear the proud excitement in the hunter’s voice as well as the dread and wonder that covered his face as he spoke. He seemed to believe in what he was speaking of. However, Zach was still particular about the fish. He loved a fish soup to death.

  ‘Why buy fish when it’s everywhere?’ There was no more asking and telling—fishes were abundant in the river.

  ‘No, we hardly eat fish. Our people don’t like fish. Even till the present time.’ Zach remembered that there was an abundance of goats, hens and their chicks and pigs that roamed the town.

  The River was ‘known’ to cure sicknesses miraculously especially a good native without any history of misconduct. The River was supposedly going to protect him from drowning. ‘There is no Nāntian known to ever have drowned in the River or its streams. Never!’, was the way the hunter put it. She was also the symbol of justice for many of the people of the town; they swore by the River and made pacts under her eyes. There were other legends, very incredible ones that will be revealed in the fullness of time.